Lord Balfe: My Lords, I draw noble Lords’ attention to my entries in the register, from which you will see that I am now in my 41st year of appointment in Brussels, with 25 as an MEP and the last 15 in other capacities. It will not tell you that I worked in international organisations for the 19 years before that, from when I left school at 16. I was first in the Crown Agents of the colonies, briefly in a junior position in the Foreign Office, and then working for the Co-operative movement.
My whole life has been devoted to multilateralism, and it has always been a difficult proposition. From the East African Common Services Organisation in 1961—which was the first multilateral body I came across—to today, there have always been opportunities for misunderstandings or clashes of different cultures. However, the important thing is that multilateralism has worked. Multilateralism has been of great benefit in many different areas of this world.
I do not believe that, if we left the European Union, the world would end. We would of course survive—we are a big and strong country—but it would be fundamentally the wrong decision to take. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell, said exactly what I feel very early on in this debate: to quote someone who may be better known on those Benches than these, I see this Bill as a “transitional demand”, because I want to stay in the European Union. I have never hidden that. This prolongs the time that we are in.
Next to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, I see my colleague—my friend, rather—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, who served with me on the Cambridge Says Yes committee, where we got well over 70% voting to remain. In Cambridge, when we argued for the referendum, I did not argue about money or the fact that we could do this or get that. It was a straightforward moral proposition that it is right to be in a multilateral organisation and co-operate with your friends, and that the pooling of sovereignty is the gaining of sovereignty. You have to realise that. We speak as though it were a one-way street, but it is not. It is a two-way street, and more comes towards us from co-operation than flows away.
Last night, the Labour Party decided that it did not wish to support an election until this Bill is passed. I hope that the Labour Party will support an election when it is passed, because the House of Commons is now ungovernable. The Government are in a minority—by 20, thanks to their own foolish actions—and they cannot get anything through anymore. We have to have an election.
A lot of my friends are among the 20 suspended. Do not just concentrate on them. I am, for my sins, the president of my local party in Cambridgeshire. I would say that roughly 20% of our members are actively on strike or, as we put it, withdrawing enthusiasm. We will be lucky if we get a window bill up. Last night, I spoke to one of them who said, “Well, I’m going to keep it quiet, Richard, but I’m going to vote Lib Dem at the election”. You can see the situation into which this politics of confrontation has pushed our party. It is a tragedy because these are people who, at heart, are Conservatives—often with a small c, rather than a larger C—but they basically believe in the principles of the Conservative Party. They feel they are being forced out of it. Only an election can settle this.
I ask the parties opposite—and the SNP—to come to some sort of agreement as to how this is to be resolved. My personal conclusion is that it probably has to be through another referendum, because the people have spoken once and it would be bitterly resented if the politicians took the decision without consulting them again. On the other hand, if the people were to return a coalition Government, it would  have to be part of the coalition programme—and then you could get a referendum Bill through, though it might take a month or two.
I mentioned that I have these jobs in Brussels which give me an office in the European Parliament. I have a staff there, only one of whom is British, so I have a fair amount of international exposure. If the British Government were to ask for an extension to hold another referendum, it would be given. It would not need a Bill in the House of Commons or the House of Lords. The EU would be pleased to grant an extension for the purpose of having a referendum. But it would not be very happy to give an extension so that we could carry on arguing. As they say—and this point has been made on several occasions—nothing is being put on the table. When I go to Brussels, which is generally twice a month, I hear the gossip around: “What on earth are they up to?” “Who is this new Prime Minister of yours who is hell-bent on destruction?” This is the image that is coming across. Colleagues opposite, you have to get your act together, and you have to bring to the election something which resembles a party deal and a way forward for the future.
To conclude, I have said that we could leave the EU. It would be difficult but not disastrous. We are also members of the Council of Europe, where the British Government have played a uniquely destructive role in opposing its budget. The Court of Human Rights has had to be cut back because the British, and Mr Salvini from Italy—now, mercifully, consigned to history—were obstructing even an increase in line with inflation. We must deal better with the multilateral bodies. We should be saying more about the WTO, where the United States is threatening to bring the whole appeals procedure to a halt by refusing to appoint judges. There are so many other multinational organisations to which we belong.
I remember when my noble friend Lord Judd was a Navy Minister. He has probably forgotten, but many years ago we were discussing NATO. I am not sure whether he said to me or I said to him that we could never have a referendum on NATO because it is too central to Britain’s interests to have it tossed around in the political field. I feel that the EU referendum was a fundamental mistake. We have made the mistake, but it is our duty to undo it. You would not go to a hospital and say to the doctor, “I am sorry, let me tell you how to take the appendix out or how to do the heart transplant”. We have to accept that there are some things that the political class may know how to do. On occasions, democracy has to be qualified. This is an unpopular thing to say, but it happens to be absolutely right. You sometimes have to say to people, “I am terribly sorry; I hear what you say, but you’re wrong”.

Baroness Bull: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. We have before us a Bill concerned with avoiding a no-deal Brexit and, like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, who is not in his place, I have been taking note of a timely and helpful report from the academics at the UK in a Changing Europe research unit about the issues,   implications and impacts of leaving the EU without a deal. At this point I declare my interest in King’s College London, as set out in the register.
I support this Bill and will confine my remarks to explaining why I believe that it is so important to avoid no deal. The report I mentioned usefully reminds us that while the Prime Minister’s “no ifs, not buts, no maybes” approach is presented as offering a clean break and allowing us all to just get on with it, it is, in reality, nothing of the sort. As the report says, no deal:
“Is not a neat way of resolving a complex problem”,
but,
“a way of rendering a complex problem infinitely more so”.
No one should delude themselves that no deal will in itself be the end of the story. There is no realistic possibility—and indeed no suggestion from anyone on any side of the debate—that we will not have a future relationship with the block of countries that represents our largest trading partner and our nearest neighbours. No deal will not be the end of the negotiations but the beginning of a new, more complex and likely even more prolonged set of negotiations. And without them taking place under the framework of a deal, do we really think that those negotiations are going to be any easier? In this scenario, any future deal will almost certainly require unanimous agreement from all member states and ratification by their parliaments. These negotiations will all be set against a backdrop of bruised and damaged relationships, both within the UK itself—as we are already seeing—and between the UK and the EU.
Leaving with a deal would mean a transition period, during which trade would continue as now while the two sides negotiated a future relationship. No deal means a cliff edge, with the UK treated by the Union as a third country. The impact on trading goods would be immediate, with new regulatory and customs arrangements coming immediately into force. This would mean disruption to supply chains, impacting crucial sectors such as food, medicines and just-in-time manufacturing. Larger businesses might be able to withstand the storm; smaller companies are unlikely to have the reserves to do so. Trade in services, always the Cinderella of the Brexit story, would be hit particularly badly. If the UK exits without a formal deal, it will no longer be covered by the services agreement of the European Economic Area but will have its trade with the EU governed by the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a treaty under the WTO. GATS provides far less access than the current EEA arrangements and therefore fewer opportunities for the UK services sector.
This disadvantage will be compounded by another challenge: professional qualifications will no longer be automatically recognised in other European countries. Under the EEA, UK qualifications are subject to mutual recognition agreements, so if you are a UK-qualified accountant or architect you can provide services in other EU countries. Under no deal this would immediately cease to be the case. Professional services suppliers would have to apply not just to have their qualifications recognised but for working visas. This sector is the second largest services exporter in the world, with 2018 services exports valued at £283 billion, or 45% of   total UK exports; of this, £117 billion-worth were exported to the EU. This is a sector, let us not forget, that provides one in five jobs, up and down the UK.
There is also no clarity on what no deal will mean for freedom of movement from 1 November. I am afraid that recent government pronouncements have not made things any clearer. The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, already referred to the concerns of the 3 million EU 27 citizens currently resident here. Without a deal, what new rules will apply and how are employers, landlords or providers of public services supposed to apply them? The profound sense of insecurity that EU citizens currently feel in this country is no doubt shared by those Britons resident in other European countries, for whom the position is perhaps even more complex and unclear.
A further, little discussed consequence of no deal is the immediate loss of access to EU databases and other forms of co-operation, including the European arrest warrant, the Schengen information system and Europol. In a world where data is key, this will present very real challenges to policing and security operations. I fear that it will provide a welcome window of opportunity to criminals intent on illegal access to and use of data.
Then, of course, there is the island of Ireland. This is almost certainly the greatest and most serious unknown at this point, already discussed in real and compelling detail by other noble Lords today. Many of the worst consequences of no deal—such as severe disruption to road and air transport links—will be averted in the short term because of temporary workarounds that the EU has put in place, but some of these expire as soon as the end of December, just two months into no deal. It is interesting to speculate what will happen to those temporary workarounds at that point, when we could well be engaged in an unedifying dispute over moneys due under a so-called divorce bill.
Whatever happens, we will eventually come through, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds suggested, but we cannot pretend that there will not be significant costs to no deal, socially, culturally, and economically. Research from the academic research unit I mentioned has found that trading with the EU on WTO terms would, after 10 years, reduce the UK’s per capita income by between 3.5% and 8.7%, and it is not the only credible source coming to a similar conclusion.
As we consider the Bill today, I ask that we be under no illusions that no deal will provide closure on this sorry period in our nation’s history. It will be just the beginning of a process that will not be easy but will be time-consuming, politically fraught and damaging to our economy. Let us not forget that the inevitable reductions in public spending that will be the consequence of economic downturn will hit hardest those people who are least able to stand it: the poorest, the most vulnerable and the marginalised in our society. For all these reasons, I support the Bill.